Interesting you should bring up the issue of hum, which I conquered just last night! The Decca tracked quite well in a Mayware I had mounted on an AR-XA, and given it is a Decca, even in this modest 'table it matched or beat my two "high-end" spinners with other cartridges, one being a Maplenoll, the other being an Audiomeca. But on the AR it hummed, a problem which, once the music started, disappeared into the background. On the Maplenoll, however, not a bit of hum, and though there is a ground wire to the arm, I have not connected it to ground, an unexpected result.
My Decca has four pins (the ground wires connected together via a looped wire), does yours? The Maplenoll has a lead platter, and so perhaps this is shielding the motor. As with some head-amps and phono stages, you just have to move things around, connect and disconnect ground wires, try your tonearm wire in different positions and so on (this is the "bitch" and "hate" part of the Decca experience). Without knowing what your 'table is I can come up with nothing else. But there is a turntable mat made out of graphite, the Boston Mat1, which might double as shielding of some sort. It also sounds - from a design point - superb. The Maplenoll also features a damping trough at the headshell, with the result that the Decca tracks perfectly (so far) in this set-up, sounding like a "normal" cartridge (now I have to play with viscosity and so on).
If you want your Decca to track superbly, then get yourself a Decca tonearm! While this is dissed as cheap, it is quite a brilliant piece of engineering (pre-empting the Platine Verdier and Schroeder tonearms), and Ken Kessler, for instance, keeps his Decca set up in one, which he considers still superior in the usual Decca ways to his Koetsu Urishi in SME 10 turntable! Don't give up! And thanks for contributing.
